The Crying Game

Not so long ago, the public tears of pro athletes were refreshing, often moving, and even beautiful—a reminder of the way sports can tap into what is most pure, noble, and boyish within us. Now, though, all this sobbing is getting pathetic

Huge Federer fan. What’s not to love? The dominance, the balletic strokes and footwork, the serene confidence, the refles that border on precognition, the intelligence evinced both on and off the court—it’s all there. And through the years I’vebeen down with the man’s franktearfulness after epic victories. Even when his sole tennis antecedent, Rod Laver, presented him with the winner’s trophy after the 2006 Australian Open—and Federer began to sputter and quake, then stepped back after failing to muster a single word—it felt a little thick, but I was down with it.

Then came this year’s Australian, in which the surging Spaniard, Rafael Nadal, rocked the Roger Federer paradigm, beating him on a hard court for the first time in a Slam final. Again, Laver was on hand, this time to present Federer with the silver runner-up platter. Again, Federer started to sputter and quake. And quiver. And heave. And keen. “Maybe I’ll try later again, I dunno,” he began. A hundred years hence, historians will cite what next came out of his mouth as the most effeminate utterance in twenty-first-century sport: “God, it’s killing me…!” Federer, face as screwy as a gargoyle’s, then withdrew from the microphone.

The television audience then witnessed a cut to Federer’s fiancée, Mirka. Mirka was not crying. Mirka was stone still, her hand over her mouth, staring. It was easy to believe she was thinking what every sensible person watching was thinking: Where have you taken Roger Federer, the surest, silkiest, most self-controlled player in the history of tennis? And who’s this moistened bint setting back the cause of manhood fifty years? It was nearly enough to make you pine for Ivan Lendl’s cyborg reign of the 1980s. Or at least the 1990s, an era in which it was tacitly understood that men crying in professional sports could be acceptable and even noble when done in murmurous fashion—and only in the context of epic triumph.

When the spectacle of top-tier male athletes crying in public began occurring frequently enough to be classified as a pattern (about twenty years ago), it was refreshing, moving, and often beautiful. The strongest, fastest, most physically blessed men in the world crying forthrightly and without shame: Who could resist it? The sight of, say, Michael Jordan awash in tears of joy and release while cradling his first Larry O’Brien Trophy carried an archetypal appeal not unlike that of a Pietà.

Fast-forward seventeen years, to January 2008—the press conference in which an unhinged Terrell Owens (actually, is there any other kind?) claimed it was unfair of reporters even to ask about what responsibility his teammate, Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo, bore for a playoff loss to the Giants. Thanks to the designer shades, you couldn’t actually see the tears. But as with nails on a chalkboard, the sound alone sufficed: “Tha’s my teammate. Tha’s my quarterback.” With that weird, wee bleat, T.O. did for the crying game what he’d already done with that Sharpie pen for the end-zone celebration: took it to a new and cartoonish place. It wasn’t just the voice or the shades or even the fact that these were unabashed tears of despair in the wake of a loss. It was the emotional displacement. An NFL superstar crying for a teammate’s (presumably) hurt feelings? The man was but a few emotional inches shy of the hysteria achieved by that adolescent boy princess who implored the world (via YouTube) to “leave Britney ALONE!!!”

How did the Björn Borg stoicism, so admired in its time, give way to today’s operatic ululations? How is it even conceivable that Mark Messier—a hockey player—could deliver a series of speeches so long, weepy, and snot-sopped that even Messier himself later made fun of them? How could John McEnroe, the most inspired insolent of his generation, fail to shriek, “You can not be serious!” when Federer (him again) looked tremulous after losing the 2008 Wimbledon final to Nadal? Instead, McEnroe dispensed with the postmatch interview he was supposed to be conducting and actually said the following: “Come here. Gimme a hug. Thank you, man.”

Even McEnroe?

The public tears of professional athletes—not by coincidence, like the public professions of religious faith by professional athletes—have become less spontaneous and more informed by previous incidents of public tears from professional athletes. Which have made them seem just a bit…stale, even in cases where the weeper is letting his lachrymal flag fly in a pure and spontaneous way. Eventually, inevitably, we’ve begun to see other kinds of tears. Unhappy tears. Despairing tears. Bitter tears. Losers’ tears. Again, all this was, at first, moving. But not for long. The charm of losers’ tears had a far shorter half-life than the joyful tears that had paved the way for them, especially when we were subject to repeat performances. In the case of serial criers like Federer, the tears now seem almost like an everyday bodily function, which makes them even more quease-inducing; fans want to see Roger Federer’s gargoyle/loser face about as much as they want to see his orgasm face and/or excretory face. Which brings us to where we are now: feeling that these beautiful crying boys were a nice enough thing for a while, but that these…crybabies are starting to grate. And dreading this month’s U.S. Open final in New York; if Nadal’s knees hold up and he somehow prevails, proving he can own Federer on any surface and in any Slam, the tears could be tidal, a real Day After __Tomorrow deluge.

Don’t get me wrong. I think a man who never cries is probably broken in some fundamental way. Jesus wept, after all. And I do like to feel that the athletes I root for are “humanized” and likable. But do I want them to be “just like the rest of us”—and to see them bear witness to their mortality with tears? Hell no. The reason I watch sports in the first place is amazement pure and simple: How was that shot/pass/catch/save humanly possible?! This amazement is a function of separation. Stark separation: I am human, and that Federer crosscourt backhand, or that Randy Moss circus catch, or that Michael Phelps hundredth-of-a-second fingertip touch, was superhuman. I revel in my own inadequacy next to these guys, and in the wondrous and stupefying contrast between us; without my inadequacy, their supremacy doesn’t exist. Which is why if there are to be tears, I want them to be the kind of quiet, quaking tears that enhance an athlete’s mythic aspect, the kind that suggest the athlete feels some of the same wordless amazement at what he’s done that I do.

So an athlete’s bawling “makes him real” by “bringing him down” to my “level”? Well, my level bores me. (And something about an athlete crying when he loses, the inescapable sourness of that, wrecks the lovely possibility of sport being a metaphor for life, rather than life itself.) Sure, I wanna be like Mike—but I just as surely don’t want Mike to be like me. Truth be told, I don’t want him anywhere near me. I want him up there, the way Zeus wanted Hercules up there when he enshrined him in the stars.

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